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supports c-span2 as public service. we are really honored to have two of the foremost historians and biographers of herbert hoover with us today. george h. nash is an historian, lecturer, and authority on the life of herbert hoover. his publications include three volumes of a comprehensive scholarly biography of hoover, and the monograph herbert hoover and stanford university. he added the previously unpublished tome, hoover betrayed, and its companion volume, the crusade years: 1933 to 1955. herbert hoover's lost memoir of the new deal era and its aftermath. nash is also author of the conservative intellectual movement in america, since 1945.

and reappraising the right of past and future american conservatism, among many other works. he's a graduate of amherst college. he received the prize in scholarly letters in 2008. he lives in south hadley, massachusetts, which he fondly refers to as east branch. kenneth whyte is the author of "hoover: an extraordinary life in extraordinary times," published in 2017. it was a finalist for the national book critic circle award. he has previously published "the uncrowned king: a biography william randolph hurst," which was "los angeles times" book of

the year in 2008. his third, "the sack of detroit" published by kanof in 2021 was a oufinalist for the hague prize. after a distinguished career in canadian journalism, mr. whyte launched the nonfiction book publishing firm sutherland house in 2018. he lives with his family in toronto. i have really had the great pleasure of knowing both of them. they don't send researchers to do their legwork for them. they have come, they have spent literally weeks over many years sitting in our research room, and of going page by page, so they're the real deal. after this session, you'll be able to purchase their books and they'll be happy to, i'm sure,

to sign them for you. so, why don't you give us a brief background about why you chose your career path. ken, let's start with you. >> well, i went into journalism, mostly because i wasn't really fit for anything else. i was a failed scholar, dropped out of school a couple of times. loved to read, loved to learn. but, you know, to be a scholar, you need to be able to hold to a disciplined course of inquiry. and i had none of that discipline. i was interested in what i was interested in when i was interested in it and that's kind of how my head worked.

and i was lucky enough to find journalism where not being able to hold to a disciplined course of inquiry is seen as a virtue. because you have to just deal with whatever is news on a given day, and whatever's most interesting, you know, in terms of the stories in front of you. so. i was delighted to find that there was somewhere i could go where my inability to concentrate would be seen as, you know, something i could get paid for. and just, just work on one story after another. and journalism led me through ke newspapers, weekly magazines, monthly magazines, i ran a magazine company in canada for a while. but all along, kept writing.

and as time went on, concentrated more on political writing, history, and biography. and i did develop an ability to afinally concentrate on one subject for long enough to get a book done. and that's -- i should mention, as well, it's a bit odd to some people that all three of the books you mentioned are american subjects and i'm a canadian. but part of the reason for that is, i -- you know, canada was my day job. i was talking about, thinking about, writing about canadian current affairs all the time. the last thing you want to do after you've done that all day is go home and write about it again at night. when you grow up in canada, it's like living next door to a circus. the united states is bigger and grander and crazier than

anything we have and so much more interesting. so that's why i always wrote my books about american subjects. >> what also struck me, though, it'ses s also true of the hoov. you actually read hurst's newspapers. and realized that a lot of what had been written about hurst and yellow journalism just didn't stack up, if you actually read it. >> no, that's true. one of the great things about, you know, the work that tom does is people keep these archives. and you can go and fact check just about anything. and so, yeah, i was writing about hurst and his early career

and the spanish-american war, which he was supposedly against. and when you go back and look at what was happening at the time. you go through how the story unfolded, day by day, you see quite another story. theodore roosevelt has a lot to answer for. but that's one of the fun things about writing any book, that process of discovery. when you go back and look at the archives. and george has done a lot more of it than i have and to great effect, as well. and really appreciate all the work he's done in the hoover archive and what he's put on record for for the benefit of all of us who have come along

and n joined the story, as it were. you know, with hoover. and i just don't want to correct you, tom, but when you introduced george, you said he was one of the great hoover authorities. to my mind, he is the hoover authority. and i don't think there's anyone else even close so we've got to get that on the record. >> so, george, when you were a young man, was it your ambition to become a professional historian, go to harvard, and -- >> no. and before i answer that, i want to thank you for those very kind words. both of you. how about that? again, thank you, again, for those very kind and gracious

words, and tom, as well. looking back on how i became a historian, i really think that my boyfriend influences had much to do with setting me on the path they took. i can remember when i was about 10 years old, my grandfather gave may mostly pictorial ten-volume history of world war ii. and that excited me greatly. it was fascinating. and before long, i was just going all the time to the town library and choosing and reading more books about the subject. i was only about 10 or 11 at the time. time. but that was a kind of imprinting experience, i suppose you could say. and it showed that i liked history and relatively current history, recent history. 1956, and i was old enough to remember this, i was just only in grade school, i vividly recall listening to radio reports and reading about the hungarian revolt.

in october and november of 1956 against the soviet occupiers of hungary. and that had something to do with my emeshlging political consciousness. i was now aware of the wider world and of the cold war that was ongoing, which i then, as boys might do, followed as events unfolded in the years just ahead. now, jumping up to high school, i was a member for four years of the debating team. and in those days, there was a national topic selected by some organization, which all of the debaters in the country studied and prepared for. one year, it was education, should it be expanded. in of year, it was the united nations should be significantly strengthened. those were current event topics, but to prepare for them, and prepare our cases as debaters, one had to do research. and chose topics had, of course, a historical dimension.

and i discovered rather fondly, that my school subscribed to the congressional record. soy found myself reading the congressional record, especially the appendix, where the members of congress could put all sorts of editorials from hometown newspapers and so on, and all sorts of interesting stuff. and that, i found, i enjoyed. and in my senior year, i guess it was in high school, i had a somewhat al american history scourse, which did not teach by textbook, but by looking at problems in american history, such as a cherokee removal under andrew jackson, that's one i vividly recalled, we studied primary sources. in a sense, i was being conditioned without knowing it to become an historian. when i entered college, i had vague thoughts that maybe i would go into the law, but i soon decided that law school would probably be pretty boring. except for institutional law,

which is intellectual history and disguise, you see. and i became a history major. and flourished in that role, i thought i did. and so, when it came time to think about what to do with my life after college, i applied to graduate school in history with the thought that i would become an academic historian, which i have in a way, but without the usual career route. that's how it came about. all of those childhood impressions, and one that just occurred to me, my father started calling me professor at some point. i don't know exactly when. i guess he thought that i had these inclinations towards scholarship, and that turned out to be true. >> so, george, then, how did that translate from becoming a historian and getting to herbert

hoover? >> well, in 1975 -- can you still hear me? i wasn't sure if it was on. all right. in 1975, i was a ph.d. from harvard, in the academic job market, and in the process of preparing my dissertation to be published as my first book, on the conservative intellectual movement in america. and it was while i was in flux, as it were, that i was approached by someone on behalf of what is now called the hoover presidential labor foundation here in iowa. they had recently celebrated the centennial of hoover's birth in 1974. and had decided in the wake of that that it was time to commission some serious systemic scholarship on herbert hoover. there wasn't much of it at that time. there were some journalistic biographies and so forth, but nothing that would be thought of as helike likely to be of endurg volume, and it was all hit or miss, so to speak. there was some, but not much.

they had learned about my book in progress and curious to know whether i might be interested in explore exploring the possible of undertaking a commissioned book or a set of books under their sponsorship. i have to tell you, i had never thought in my life of writing a biography of herbert hoover until that came in out of the blue, that opportunity. so i started to study hoover more, i knew little about him, mostly through the graduate study, but i realized that hoover was a friend about many of the people about whom i had written my dissertation, turning into my first book. he was a kind of patron of conservative causes in his later years, even a patron saint in the eyes of many people on the right. he helped william f. buckley a bit in founding buckley's "national review" magazine in 1955. so i thought, well, it's kind of

a clonlg step from going to studying the conservative intellectuals, to someone who at least in his older age, was thought of as a patron of that philosophy. and then, i also realized that as the association, as they called themselves then, realized that herbert hoover was an understudied and underappreciated president. so before we came to any definitive arrangement, i came out here to west branch and spent several days meeting the archivists, learning about the breadth of the holdings and sort of, and inwardly asking myself the question, am i interested enough in this man to want to commit to him for a period of time to study his life. i and i went to the stanford study of hoover.

and i realized that there was more to hoover than the superficial that was around. so i decided it was worth exploring. and we came to a contract, an arrangement, underwhich i would write a definitive scholarly biography, quote/unquote, meaning something very comprehensive and in depth and requiring a lot of turning of pages, of documents, of which there are many millions right here. and we came to an arrangement and so later this year, i undertook what became known as the herbert hoover biography project. and i have to say, i'm still writing about hoover at this point in my life, not in that series, but in another project i might mention later. and i have not gotten bored by him over all of these years. such was the immense range of his interest and excellents. >> before we get to you, ken. i just want to take a moment to recognize the archivists in the room that have helped both of you. dwight miller, who was the first

archivist hired here at the hoover library, and hand-picked by president hoover. we have former supervisory archivist craig white, who recently retired. his successor, patrick osborn, and then lynn smith, the av archivist. they're kind of the unknown -- the hidden hands behind all of these research projects. so, ken, how did -- i mean, i'm sure hoover is not a revered figure in canada that you felt you needed to -- >> no, nobody talks about him on the streets in canada. but you know, of course, he has the canadian connection, his mother was born in canada. but i didn't know that until i

was well into it. i wound up writing a biography of hoover mostly because i couldn't write the book i wanted to write.op i had been reading about quite deeply in the first world war. and hoover kept popping up all over the place, as this incredibly competent figure who was doing amazing things and you know, in london and belgium, and all over the continent after the fighting stopped. and it was such a, such a different portrayal of hoover in materials from that time, from the war, than the portrayal that i had read about in the usual american histories that caught my attention. and that led me to read deeper

into the commission for relief of belgium, which i thought was probably the greatest thing i had ever heard about any individual doing as a private citizen inanywhere, at any time. you know, the fact that he started, you know, on this project of feeding the belgium people, who were occupied by the germans and blockaded by the british for the duration of the war. you know, it wasn't his job. no one hired him to do it. he wasn't paid for it. it was just something he felt very urgently that he need to do. and the enormous capacities that he displayed getting the food, the ships, the money, at a time when all of these things were in really short supply, because there was a war going on. i wanted to tell that story. i wanted to write a book about the belgium relief.th

and so i, you know, did what you usually do in these situations. you make an outline, send it to your agent, your agent shops it around, sees if he can get you a publisher. they all came back and said, no, we're not interested. if you're going to do hoover, you have to do the president. and i didn't want to write a presidential biography. i just -- i'm not really a fan of presidential biography, as a reader. a lot of the -- there's a lot of good scholarship in presidential biographies, especially the big multi-volume projects, the kind of stuff that george does. but a lot of the one-volume presidential biographies for the general reader just tend to be, why my favorite president is the best president biof all time. and it's almost an exercise in fandom, rather than in, you

know, really biographical scrutiny. and i just didn't know much about hoover at the time. but with all the rejections of the original proposal to do the commission of relief more belgium, i thought, okay, well maybe i should look a little bit deeper into hoover and see if there is enough there to do a biography. and that's when my real education on hoover started. and you see the boyhood, you see the stanford years, you way, an

proposing to write a when you lay it all out as i had to do in proposing to read a bug you to try to convince the publisher to take it it was just spectacular. one huge undertaking or one huge event after another all through the course of his life, and as somebody once said about him he was something to home the incredible was always happening. eventually it dawned on me that he was an ideal subject for a biography, and that is how i got into it. >> was there anything in particular that surprised you

that you found really incredibly eye-opening during this research?>> there were a lot of things. the real tension that i found in his life was that he was somebody who was not suited for politics. if you went to central casting and asked for somebody to run for president that would not show you a herbert hoover. he was not a conventional politician. he was an engineer. he believed in data.

he believed in hard work. had very empirical cast of mind. he was not a performer in the least. not very comfortable around strangers. all of those things you are required to do as a politician that a part of your job as a politician. he had no real affinity for ability at and had actually a bit of contempt for people who were good at it. thinking politics were to a certain extent beneath him yet so much of the momentum of his life is towards politics and public office in the presidency and very much wanted to. to me that was one of the interesting puzzles. one of many about hoover that i found compelling. >> what are some of the more surprising things you discovered? >> i think what surprised me most early on and is a common reaction of anyone who goes to the museum here. the sheer scope and duration and magnitude of hoover's accomplishments.

he was born in 1874. died in 64. 90 years old. 50 of those years were in public service or at least the public spotlight. i do not think that has any president or parallel really in american history. so that is repeatedly affected me and made it an interesting failure to study because he really had a succession of careers. during which he went around the world five times before world war i. that is to say before the advent of commercial aviation. he became a humanitarian with this truly remarkable early commission founded in 1914. i think they expected it would end quickly. instead it grew and grew and

lasted throughout the war. expended almost $1 billion in the currency of that time. saved over 9 million belgian and french lives. that was only the first chapter that became the humanitarian work of 1919, which was involved in feeding i think 4 million tons of food distributed around europe. notably poland and austria, but many others. all of that resulted in saving many more millions of lives, and then in 1921 i do not know if this has been mentioned yet today. hoover's american relief administration which was a private entity having initially been a government entity during 1919, but it morphed into a private endeavor with woodrow wilson's official permission. they responded to the call from russia for relief in what was considered to be the greatest

famine in europe since the middle ages. hoover did not go there personally but send staff there and do something like 768,000 tons of food. distributed and 100,000 location with americans there to supervise the staff. that is a topic that very few americans know about. i suspect most in this room do. it is a chapter in hoover's life that is extraordinary. if you add it all up he supervised or facilitated relief efforts that saved tens of millions of lives and has been set of his and i believe correctly and a sense of viewing relief in this nature that he was responsible for

saving more lives than anyone who has ever lived. incomes the commerce department. we heard some of the highlights of that. secretary of commerce was called and that was kind of a double edge because some of the other departments didn't appreciate hoover's attempts to consolidate more agencies in his domain, but he was one of the three or four dominant figures in american public life in the 1920s. she got to be elected president of the united states without ever having held a public office. a few generals managed to do that like ulysses grant and eisenhower, but for a civilian to do that is all the more remarkable. and then we come to this long period as an ex-president elder statesman and to use his term against collectivism along with being a philanthropist and doing many other things as well. i think that is what most

impressed me is the sheer scope and duration of it. if a man was very intense and it's marvelous. many people are awed by his ability to work so hard and stay focused and to be an intellectual. it was truly an astonishing thing, and that got him a long way. also of course led to a dip in the great depression, which i suppose we will talk about as we go along. >> because he spent so many years studying him and i am sure things have come before. if you had to revisit your work is there anything that you would change or and newbie evaluations you have now of characterizations you had earlier? >> not fundamentally. i did write the first volume

before misses hoover's papers became available to scholars. herbert hoover had requested his wife's papers be kept closed until 20 years after his death. i finished my first volume published in 83, so the papers did not become legally accessible so to speak or under that arrangement until october of early 85 they worked on processing the materials. from that point on. if i were to go back i think i might find some anecdotes to insert or quotations and things like that. i do not think it would change the fundamental outline of what i said, but it would make for may be an improvement on some pages to have fresher material. that kind of happenstance really reflects what someone has said about historians. history is a conversation without end. when new sources come through

we have fresh opportunities it to re-examine a figure or when someone goes out of fashion in comes back in so that we have that perpetual conversation as historians. that would be my answer to your question. >> same question. >> no not really. i do not think that i would change anything. that is a difficult question. in my other books i think i could rewrite both of them and make them better. i was really happy with the way hoover turned out. there is so much material. if any of you had the opportunity to go back and just see how many boxes of material. how many walls of boxes of material there is in this

library. it is just phenomenal. i have often thought that if i had or were to start over again today i could write another biography of herbert hoover that would be 80% different in content from the one that i wrote and probably be just as good. and just as interesting. there is so much there in his life and so many different ways to get at his story. so many different sources that you could really tell the story through a number of different ways. while i do not think i would change anything in the book there are things that i wonder. i tried to keep everything to 600 pages, but i did not want it to become a doorstop.

there were a couple of angles that i wish i could have explored a little bit deeper. one was the fact that he spent his formative years. his early adult years out of the country. really came to his maturity and his place in the world. very different political environment. always want to tease out the ways in which the politicians there. he brought back with him in the united states and how they shaped his thinking. know that was one angle that i

thought, you know, would have been fun to do more on. and i also probably could have he was in touch with a lot of progressive ideas then currently in the uk. that was one angle that i thought would have been fun to do more of on. probably could have spent a lot more time on his later career. one of the problems in a narrative buyer of the. you want to keep the reader turning pages. when you get through the presidency you have kind of hit the climax of hoover's life. you feel a need for dramatic purposes to get offstage after that as expeditiously as you can.

he had half of his adult life almost after the presidency, and i did that and about 15% of the book. that to me does not seem entirely fair. there are a lot of other books. georgia has done great work on the latter part of his career and so on, so -- and as he said, history is an ongoing conversation and there will be many other fees to be written about hoover and hopefully all of these things will be thoroughly addressed. >> as you indicated earlier, a lot of presidential biographies. almost fall into the category -- and you both talked about very

admirable and outstanding traits that hoover had that kind of set them apart from others. were about finding any troublesome faults? >> we all have faults. herbert hoover had his share. to me i mentioned earlier one of the interesting parts of his career to me was his business career, and what was fascinating was just how driven he was and how determined he was to succeed, and nothing was going to get in his way of him succeeding and making a fortune as a mining engineer. he cut a lot of corners.

and he was at times in his life desperately concerned that his activities not come to public notice. particularly his dealings in china. i think it is pretty hard to defend his behavior and mining deals that he did. and his attitude towards the chinese people it generally was often wanting, so he was a young man in those years. some of his behavior was not at all attractive. his other fault to my mind. the one that is more relevant to his career as a politician. what i mentioned earlier. a certain arrogance towards the practice of politics, which i

find unattractive in somebody who wants to be a politician. he didn't think that he had to learn the trade. he knew he was smart. the man was brilliant. we have talked a lot about how smart he was, but he had probably the greatest were one of the greatest intellects of all of the presidents to hold office, but he did not put in the work to learn politics. you did not learn his party. you did not learn congress. and it would have been i think far to his advantage to have put in that effort, and he might have had a different career as president had he done that.

>> i would point to something that his friends often worry about, and that was they thought he was overly sensitive to criticism. his friend was undersecretary of state. he thought that was one of hoover's faults that his sensitivity to criticism, and he would give very easily rattled by the politicians who he thought were often rather ordinary creatures at best, and he was also rattled by william randolph hearst. it was that particular episode or one of them alluding to in the diary entry. hoover was afraid with his national chain of newspapers would do hoover great political damage, as i think he did, and supporting roosevelt and criticizing hoover so extensively in the campaign of

1932. that is something that others -- i am reporting what friends thought. it was said he had the thinnest skin and washington. he could not let some of this slide by. he would go out and demand retraction or send surrogates out or send rebuttals or do various things. in fact he said of himself that he had a naturally combative disposition. he probably could have ignored more than he did, and that would have made some difference because he spent so much time being worried about that. thinking mostly of the 20s in the 30s. the periods in which he had one term as president and 3 terms in the white house. otherwise known as the harting and coolidge administrations.

hoover was an outsider and he was feeling it this way along and just become very upset by what we today would think was rather mild criticism for what is sometimes called justice misrepresentations. i think that was an inhibiting factor. the politician stock of hoover that he was too much of an outsider and a man who made a career outside of politics. had others who thought of politics more. had been in his corner. so there was a lot of distrust of him. he referred to congress, which is still in existence in those days -- rather the prohibition was in existence, and he caught

at that beer garden on the hill. i do not know whether that come back to the members of congress, but you can see there was a gap. and then hoover famously said there ought to be a law allowing the president to hang too many years without being required to give any reason. one thing i have never been able to resolve in my inquiries or research is which senator he was referring to when he referred to them as the only verified case as a negative iq. so it worked both ways. speaker of the house.

gardner for example, and so forth. so hoover did not get along, and yet he was more effective in bringing people in to consult and was one of his strengths. he tended to be not good at political behavior of the kind you >> hoover did not get along and yet he was more effective in bringing people into consult. one of the strengths. he tended to be not good at political behavior. going out and kissing babies and so on. he hated all of that. if you put him in a room like a conference room with captain of industry and leading bakers and others he could dominate that because of his intellect and idealism and they could see that so he could often have effective communication with politicians and that way.

in terms of broader political maneuvering it wasn't so easy for him to navigate that way. he came up against a man who was a charmer. who first suffered by comparison in terms of political effectiveness. i think those are some points may be that i would elaborate on what you correctly have said already.>> you both talked about the fact that newspapers didn't become available until very late, so you don't have good biographies of her available, and many of the biographies she is not a prominent figure. her.

she was the first woman, i believe, at stanford to major in geology and graduate with a major she may have been the first woman in the united states. it was obviously not >> misses hoover was an intelligent woman. it was obviously not a woman's field in 1898. the year of her graduation from stanford. i picked up stories in my research. when they were living in china for a couple of years she went down into a mind with him, and that was regarded, so they went down.

i interviewed a very elderly australian mining man. for research on hoover. he said he remembered misses hoover accompanied herbert around 1906. she went down into a mine and did it naturally. she knew something about mining and geology. i guess he was a witness to this. they were flabbergasted about the idea. i think one of the bonds they had to between them was intellectual curiosity. it showed up in different ways. famously which they spent about five years translating from the latin as it was written by a

german scholar in the 1500s corning terms that were not available in the old latin. it was a giant puzzle to be solved. it is a remarkable book. misses server probably did more work than he did on a day-to- day basis, but it was a collaboration. i think that was a sign of their intellectual curiosity. that is the impression i have of her peers she was very alert. she was not one to step into the limelight with him. she was supportive but had her own interests such as the girl scouts, as has been noted. i think that was something that bonded them. i have read a lot of her letters. they are rather different from his in style. his tend to be precise and to the point. she would write to her son long

letters, but very interesting. in her way she was an administrator of a household entourage as he was, so she had an administrative talent as well i would say. the final thing that strikes me about the marriage is my goodness. how busy it was. they were always moving. especially in the early years and back and forth. and had maids and servants and chauffeurs and so on. kind of lived that style. that is one way that london may have affected him. it was said of hoover once that he was too progressive for the conservatives and too conservative for the radicals. in a way i think you might say something analogous about misses hoover and the hoover marriage. that it was a modern marriage. somewhat unconventional in ways and yet it was not so unconventional as to put her in the vanguard of people who are activist and so far. she was not going to go out and be

arrested in demonstrations unlike one of her friends that he had to bail out in london, so you would also want to say something more, and she had a very close tie with misses coolidge. they became close friends. the one thing was they were both slightly amused by their husbands activities and politics. the -- sure she is a very interesting and capable person. >> the marriage has to be considered a success. it lasted until death do them part, and they were still on speaking terms. better than half of them right there. i think with you in many ways was an ideal companion for him when you think about how they got married in california.

him coming in from australia and from getting off a ship. they arrange the wedding hastily within 48 hours. they are on a ship to china where neither of them have ever been before. not every young woman would have been up for an adventure like that a, but lou absolutely was. went down in the minds and during the rebellion out on patrol with a firearm strapped to her hips. she was an adventurous lady. they did have a very busy life. i found it kind of hilarious the way they ran their household.

everything seemed to be a bit of a mess or a model all the time. when they came back from england to america they just left. they had a huge, beautiful house in england. they just left it there. left the staff in place. the staff was running the place as it saw fit. one of the servants sold a piano on their behalf and pocketed the proceeds. they were all kinds of things like that going on. it translated to washington when they came to live there. there would be guests coming to stay with the hoovers. invited guests who would arrive to find neither of them home. and all kinds of missed connections in their correspondence back and forth. there are frequently misunderstandings and disputes

about who was supposed to look after what or be responsible for what, so just a normal marriage in many respects. i think she was also very advantageous to hoover socially and that she was much better at a dinner party than he was. any kind of social occasion. she was better at smalltalk. the more charming personality. and she was very useful to him in his ambitions to meet the right people in london and to entertain the right people in washington. she played quite an important role in that regard. i think he would have struggled without her. he probably benefited more if

you had to weigh the relationship from what she brought to it. in terms of support and he was not always there for her when she was having difficult times in her life. some health problems from time to time. he would continue to work, as per usual. i think there were probably lonely times for lou given all the work you took on. how much she was away. as a whole i think it was a successful relationship, and they both benefited from it considerably. >> the last question i had

before i open it up to the audience. the popular notion is that the hoover presidency is a failure and that franklin roosevelt's presidency is a success. does that comport with what you found? >> no. history is complicated, and you really have to look at this carefully. for a long time herbert hoover was dismissed as a presidential failure because obviously the depression didn't end and therefore the assumption was that he could have ended it if he had done something differently. i will get back to that. the thing is that hoover did too little. too stuck in the mud. too grin and so forth. that stereotype i think has pretty much been dismissed by historians.

there is another stereotype more recent coming more from the libertarian side, which is that he did too much. that is to say he made policy decisions that exacerbated the depression like signing the tara. raising taxes and a couple of other things. when i talked to the different audiences. depending on which one it might be. i told the libertarians they do not understand the conservative side of hoover. he would go so far but no further. he said in his climactic campaign addresses where this election is more than a contest between two men or two parties but a contest of philosophies of government and going to determine the course of the nation for over a century to come. and he later said that was one of his most prophetic audiences. i do not think that failure is quite the way to look at it. i think what you should do is

examine the effort that hoover made that almost succeeded. in particular in 1931 when he signed not of the referendum, but the moratorium. that probably saved central european banks from collapse. why was that important? because american banks had poured a lot of money into germany as loans in the 1920s. they would have been exposed if the german banking system collapsed, as it nearly did. that would have brought a calamity to the united states much sooner than the last days of hoover's term. that is one case where i think hoover took an action that at least averted disaster. the second one i would point to is bringing into play the

reconstruction finance corporation which gave out or delivered several thousand loans to banks and other businesses between february and the summer of 1932. a few billion dollars worth. that was -- they were able to thereby put out many brushfires. particularly in chicago, which came with the largest banking within minutes really or hours of closing with 120,000 depositors and no deposit insurance to rescue them. there was none until 1934. we must remember that. hoover managed to engineer that in the nick of time.

the federal reserve board with good intentions made many policy errors and mistakes and was operating under doctors and judgments that we now know to have been mistaken. i would say we should think of hoover not as a success or

failure in theft in individual cases, but as a man who tried like sisyphus to push that rock up the hill and ancient greek mythological figure. he pushed the border of the hill. just as he is about to succeed it will roll back down again and he would have to start all over again. i think hoover was our modern sisyphus almost turned the corner on several cases. i think they mentioned this in his volume. the undertone was such from the federal reserve that i think much of what he did in his anxiety and attempts to get people together. much of it was rather relevant to the underlying problem because at that point in time i do not think hoover or the fed or anybody practically quite understood the centrality of the monetary contraction in making the recession turned into the catastrophe that it became. i would leave you with that thought. think of hoover as a figure that is noble and he did much

good in many ways and other things we could mention. that is the kind of obstacle that he faced. i do not think any other president in his place could have done much better as long as the fed had the mindset that it did. >> i agree with that. i would add a couple of things though. i think hoover was far more successful than he is given credit for. and i agree with what george said about both people on different sides of the debate thinking that he did too much or he did too little. i think you did an enormous amount. there is no way that roosevelt can do what he did in the new

deal without hoover. you just can't get from calvin coolidge and a total hands off don't interfere with god's economy approach to governance to roosevelt without a figure like hoover in between. but the question was relative to fdr. was hoover's successful versus roosevelt? i do not think that really at the end of the day there is much room for debate. hoover failed to win a second term. failed to carry the judgment of the american people. into a second term. yes the depression was a very difficult thing to deal with, but his term wasn't entirely about the depression be one of

the most interesting documents that i found and tom's fabulous archive was this thing called the hauser report which was a piece of public opinion research done three weeks before the vote in 1932 when hoover was against roosevelt. it was really the first scientific poll ever done an american presidential election. it asked 5000 representative people across the country what they thought was going on in the election and the economy. the really interesting thing was that to the extent hoover was leading support going into 32 after winning a big victory in 28. prohibition was the biggest issue.

that was causing people to abandon him, and the democrats because roosevelt promised to end prohibition but when you ask people about the great depression at that time about 65% of the people believe that hoover bore some responsibility . more thought wall street was primarily to blame for the great depression. also most people thought the great depression was over going into the election of 1932. they thought things were turning up in the economy. that employment was coming back. that the future was bright and rosy. i think we all tend to overestimate to a certain extent how politically relevant the depression was in 1932 and

may be that hoover himself overestimated the degree to which the economy was an issue in 1932. regardless he failed to get his party lined up behind him and energized going into that election, which was his job as leader of the republicans and president. he fought the election largely alone. he did not have a support. not a lot of funds behind him. it was a very difficult road. if hoover is underrated to my mind roosevelt is a bit more than a bit overrated. on often

disturbing behavior and so i would i would argue that yes. hoover is underrated and roosevelt is a bit overrated, too. but roosevelt i would argue that hoover is underrated and roosevelt meanwhile is a bit overrated. roosevelt was a brilliant politician and it managed to find a constituency. a new constituency in america for the democratic party and it held together for two decades. he was in a very difficult time

in the american economy during the great depression. i think the more effective leader of the american public. challenged. at this time. again, on if you have a question raised. oh, they're already lined up at that is to my mind crwhere he w especially challenged. >> at this time again if you have a question -- they are already lined up at the microphone. please say your name and indicated to him the question is directed.

>> thank you to the panel and the library and the museum, and thank you to the previous family panel. one of the things that i appreciate about this library and museum is trying to restore hoover's reputation and to share his story fairly. not sugarcoating things but also saying that there is good therapy my wife and i went to the museum that just opened in ohio. i was wondering if the panel could comment on hoover's relationship with harting. just speak about that.

>> harting called hoover the smartest i know. united states to join or and harding was dancing all around it, but he basically was against it. but harding came to rely upon >> hoover wanted the league of nations and united states to join and harting was dancing all around it but basically was against it. he came to rely upon hoover as a great source of information and a very useful cabinet secretary. i think hoover became close that way. did not go to the parties as to where they are gambling on.

i will share an anecdote that comes to my ahead. the senator from california was a bitter opponent of hoover appeared they were rivals in that state. i came across my research. johnson's evaluation of the cabinet. he said he wants hoover and the secretary of state for respectability. the rest of them are essentially his cronies. hoover did bring responsibility to the cabinet and insisted that harting give him a broad interpretation of the >> of influence that the commerce department could have. i have sometimes wondered whether harting would have wanted hoover to be his running

made in 1924. i have no evidence for that. i might want to see whether there were any hints of that. so i think hoover saw harting not as the smartest, but as a man who had considerable ability and a good soul you might say but with his weaknesses. among those weaknesses was allowing cronies to take advantage of him. you should look up hoover's address at the memorial in 1949 i think it was. maybe 1930 when hoover essentially denounced the men who died him down. and i thought was rather perceptive and fair towards him

. >> i will just add i thought it was a really interesting point you made about hoover and their reputational difficulties and how both of them are underrated. to my mind he was a hugely effective president. you read what shape america was in after the first world for. wilson was pretty much -- the last year of his term. the mobilization was completely botched. there were general strikes and riots and all kind of problems throughout the country. in a very short period of time harding put things back on an even keel and laid the foundations for the prosperity that america enjoyed through

the 1920s, and i think coolidge ended up getting a lot of credit for the great work that harding did. i am glad you went to marion and i am glad you noticed the connection between the two. >> a little nervous i might be kicking a be-this question, but it is kind of a dream to have you both here to grapple with it because i have wondered since reading your book and especially the chapters on china and the research that you did on china. if how you understand or how you encounter and frankly given how you have researched herbert hoover. and written about herbert hoover. how you respond to that chapter

of hoover's life. sort of a question to george asking for a response to the chapters. because it is a different picture which on some level feels completely unbelievable and may be a little believable. maybe you can help us understand it or i would love to understand how you understand it and to have your response. >> i guess i would refer you to something i haven't read in a while. my response to ken's interpretation of hoover and china. i think that hoover was amongst a den of thieves. i do not know that there was an honest one in the bunch.

hoover is a guy of 25 years old, and living by his let's he might say. i think it does seem that he really put pressure to sign a memorandum, which is british boxes did not honor. it is an ambiguous situation i would say that put hoover in and so i do not know that he is without reproach and that. he was very sensitive about it because the democrats got wind of it in 1920 and 28 and sent people over and actually interviewed if not him someone like him, and hoover went to great length to prepare documents that could be used as retorts. i think he thought that hearst was going to yield the great explosion. if you look at it obviously he

sensed it was a sore spot or a potential danger point for him. i think what we would have to say in hoover's defense that he was in a crowd where there was no particular ethical bearing for some of them. he tried in a way to be fair because there was a contract that was given over to the british and also in memorandum, and they ignored the memorandum. i think hoover was offended by some of the deal that wasn't kept, but hoover was in the position of having to get them to sign the document and he put pressure on. he says that he used main force to do it, and we do not know exactly what that meant, but it certainly did not sound like it was a pleasant confrontation. the battle between them went on.

because he was being asked to give up chinese title or thought to chinese property, which he was responsible for letting these western types perhaps exploit the whole situation. he went to london with failure to carry out the terms of the deal and won his case. it did not turn out to be a very effective victory for details that i do not remember at the moment. the chinese did something curious. they created a parallel company , which i think eventually consolidated with the one that hoover had been involved with. when that consolidation occurred hoover was left off the board. i know that in china today

hoover's reputation is as he is one of the for in the use. an agent of all of these and so forth. i think he was an agent but trying to deal with people who were untrustworthy. trying to serve up to a point but also served his british boss and trying to get something that he could consider acceptable, but it was a rough moment for him. you may want to elaborate on that. i do not know. >> i do not think we are far apart. i think your point about him being young is valid. he was 25. he was a junior player in the

company that he represented, but he put himself in the situation and did the deeds that he was accused of doing. he made comments in newspapers to the effect of the only way to negotiate with the chinese is the point of a gun, so i don't think there is any getting around the fact that herbert hoover was not blameless in every aspect of his life. every president has been very much a human being and they have good moments and bad moments. i do not think it should take away from the fact that he did magnificent things with the rest of his life. i think a lot of the things that he did afterwards you can actually read as an effort to make amends for some of the errors that he made as a young

man. i am not sure he would have been so determined at the age of 40 to turn himself to his humanitarian endeavors had he not embarrassed himself a bit and his business career and had produced a legacy that he wanted to correct to some extent. i think it is all a piece, and it is really important for an understanding of history and the man to accept that he was not infallible and that there were times that even by his own values i think let himself down . >> just a really quick footnote to what you have been saying. last few months there have been several chinese delegations.

one that went to iowa city. they are looking to set up a sister city relationship. i was invited, and they know about hoover. if you go online the museum re- creates his office when he was in china. i was expecting kind of a negative, but actually they seem rather proud of the fact that an american president was familiar with china and had stayed there. they now have a different name, but the fact there is still in operation again is kind of credit to hoover's ability to look at the reports and figure

out the profitability and its operations. the second visitor was the counsel general from chicago from china. i think he brought his two sons and he brought up the fact that hoover oversaw the minds and that they have this exhibit in the museum, and both delegations seem more interested in kind of a cultural exchange for americans to go learn more about china just as >> and of course premier xi jinping and his relationship with the governor and ambassador has been long-

standing so there is this special relationship right now, with iowa but, which extends back to hoover.>> just want to add one quick question. the reason the mines went in control, china was in a state of anarchy and was afraid, who would grab the mines, the russians or the japanese question mark so the british looked comparably respectable, but he turned out unable to resolve the capital he was supposed to raise, so he turned to some belgians, people who hoover clashed and ironically, you would know this i'm sure,

the man who ran the belgian side of the relief inside belgium, was somebody who met hoover in china and they hadn't gotten along and hoover thought the belgians represented were exploiting and mistreating the chinese, so hoover was indignant at what the belgians were up to and 13 or so years later, hoover has to cooperate in the relief of belgium and they didn't always cooperate in a friendly basis i have to add, it became quite a feud, although ultimately hoover won his points and he settled down and he visited hoover when he was president, and hoover sent the widow food relief packages during world war ii. so, all these angles. >> we did have the point that a well fed was not a good public image about starving people.

next question.>> this isn't so much about political philosophy but more about style, you have hoover being followed by roosevelt, do you see a similarity between that and 50 years later of jimmy carter being followed by ronald reagan?>> well, many people at the time compared carter to hoover, i think unfortunately, carter was an engineer in a way and he was a person who enjoyed statistics and management but he didn't project well, whereas reagan was a great campaigner and so forth, so people made superficial comparisons between the two of them. also, i think there is another comparison to be made, carter had a happy one-year term, and he spent much of the rest of his life doing humanitarian work of various kinds and

hoover having lost office after one term spent the rest of his career seeking vindication in various ways. so i think in both carter and hoover and nixon by the way, who wrote a bunch of books in exile, so to speak, as an ex- president, they all had unsuccessful or unhappy experiences in the white house and they then strove to make something of the rest of their careers so you can make a kind of comparison between them that, hoover was not in the carter camp ideologically. >> hello, i'm linda, proud to be a native island and i believe that henry hoover was the first first lady to invite the wife of an african american congressman to tea and she persisted it was awesome, and have you come across any correspondence about that event?

>> i didn't see any correspondence about the event in particular but it was noted at the time, and well covered at the time, and certainly something that she deserves to be remembered for, and it is hard to appreciate now, just what an impressive and progressive move that was at the time, a simple invitation to tea, but it was recognized at the time. >> thank you so much for your panel and your knowledge today, thank you.>> so i think if you go on a website, we have a lesson plan on the caprice

which might have primary sources, i know if you go in the permanent galleries, there is some of the correspondence critical in support of that, that we have reproduced that is in the cases. >> [indiscernible]>> it was really brought to attention, it actually compacted the sentence of the caprice family who then loaned her photographs, so i believe i was a middle school student. >> thank you.

>> last question perhaps, i have been an iowan since january, 1939, and i believe that the solution to many of america's problems today exist in president hoover's little book of american individuality, and i see to it that my children and my grandchildren have copies of that book and i wonder if you can identify another top selection of his publication that i might go to next. >> well, if you haven't read this book about wilson in paris, hoover wrote a lot, produced a lot of books, not all of them are great reading but, wilson in paris is a

terrific book, really interesting insight in what was going on then, and i'm glad you mentioned american individualism because probably of everything he wrote, that is my favorite, and the political test he poses in there for any new policy, that it has to do something to advance the quality of opportunity and at the same time, to stimulate people, to motivate people to work hard and contribute to society. i think it is a brilliant little insight that i find very useful in looking at any kind of policy proposal. it is a terrific book and

deserves to be more widely read and the edited version of that, if you read the introduction to the addition that is available, i highly recommend it.>> we haven't talked much about hoover's political philosophy today but i think that exemplifies it and i agree with what he said so well. he also wrote a book called the challenge to liberty published in 1934 which was a critique of the new deal without ever mentioning it by name, he had a term for it, regimentation but all sorts of collectivist ideologies he felt were an assault on what he considered to be true liberalism or historic liberalism and that is an important part of the hoover legacy in my view, the philosophical explanation of the american system if you

will, broadly speaking, that he made, and i think can be still studied with profit at this point in time.>> i think we have one last question.>> andy chandler, indianapolis, good afternoon and thank you for being here, my question is that you mentioned mr. white, the idea of a book or what we can write about the ex-presidency, the question i have is two questions which is, the presidents club by duffy, you mention the relationship but there seems to be a little bit on the fence in the first chapter regarding the resources, because i know they became really good friends, can you comment on that as well, for instance, and i don't like to do the hypothetical,

hypothetically speaking, you are writing a book about the ex- presidency, what would be the kind of theme that you would want to do if you were given that kind of free reign?>> my recollection, correct me if i'm wrong, my recollection is that truman and hoover did not really have a relationship when truman reached out to him and invited him to participate in some of the things that his government was doing, but they did form quite a good relationship, as evident in their correspondence. you know, in a nutshell, the narrative of hoover's post presidency is a guy who is

just, frankly racked after he lost the election in 1932 and embarrassed even to be seen in public, but eventually regaining his bearings and carving out a new role for himself as a senior statesman within the republican party and going on to do great service for truman after the first world war and that his work with eisenhower, the presidential commission in the 50s where they essentially reviewed and reconstructed the whole of the operations of the federal government, just an enormous undertaking and probably something that no other american could have done or at least anywhere as well as hoover, given his vast

experience, the fact that he had directly worked with five presidents, including eisenhower. he had such a great understanding of how the government had evolved to what it was at that point and what it needed to go forward, and as ongoing support for other republican leaders, his close relationship with robert taft, for instance, and then up to the end of his life, he was still advising both the kennedys and nixon at the end of his life, so you know, there's so much to talk about, there wasn't really anything that didn't happen through the rest of the great depression, through the second world war, through the cold war that hoover, to some extent wasn't involved in, and deeply interested in and had something really important to say about.

>> around 1920, around world war i or right after, hoover wrote an essay called information for biographers, i think it was something he was contemplating, but he said there is little importance to men's lives except the accomplishments they leave to prosperity, then he adds, when all is said and done, accomplishment is all that counts. i think he lived by that philosophy, and also, he says in the same passage that for him, the most easily measured form of such accomplishment is, to use his words, in the origination or administration of tangible institutions, so hoover, in his way, and mrs. hoover were institution builders, and hoover, i think

it helps to kind of explain the focus of his life, that accomplishment is what mattered to him right down till the very end, he never slow down. so i think that is a remarkable philosophy. i'm not sure i share it entirely, i would like to think that enjoyment along the way has importance and we don't totally focus on just getting things done. but, i do think it is an admirable statement and a very provocative one and i think it tells us a lot about what drove herbert hoover through this truly extraordinary life.>> and to quickly build on two things that george said, we haven't talked about stanford, and you mentioned institution buildings and hoover's role at stanford, there was a book written about it, we talked about how big his

life is, how much he was involved, we can talk for hours and it doesn't even come up that he more or less was probably the most important person in the history of the stanford university, and secondly in terms of there being more to life, that is one of the things i think we forget about with both herbert and hoover, they had a lot of fun along the way, reading about their early relationship, when they were young and in love and in china and matching pajamas and traveling around, seeing things, and when they are in england, they put all of their winnings into a fund so they can just take off at a moments notice and go to, somewhere exotic in the world or interesting in the world. not all of hoover's ideas were

fun, what most of us would consider fun, you know, throwing a medicine ball over an eight foot net for an hour or a going out into a stream and moving the boulders around or sitting under a hot florida sun for eight hours looking for bonefish, he had a singular idea of fun, but he knew what he liked to do and he always took some time in his life to enjoy himself, and i think that is an important part of his personality to remember. >> let's thank our speakers and just a reminder that if you would like to purchase their books and have them sign it, you can get them in our gift shop, thank you so much, thanks for coming. safe travels. >> if you are enjoying american

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